Killing Castro

We are now approaching the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and every year since I first wrote on this subject in 1965, I am asked “Was Oswald alone, and, if not, who was behind the assassination?” While researching Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, I interviewed Thomas Mann, the former US Ambassador to Mexico in 1976. He told me that after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, the CIA station in Mexico believed Castro might have behind the assassination based on “opportunity and means.”

According to Mann, their case was built on the witnesses in the Cuban Embassy reporting that Oswald had offered his services and one witness saying Oswald met with a Cuban official outside the Embassy. The Warren Commission rejected these allegations in its Report, and Mann himself was abruptly recalled from Mexico. So the allegations seemed at the time a dead end.

What I did not know then was that Castro also had a very direct motive. The CIA had used a double agent in an attempt to assassinate him. This agent was deemed “insecure” which meant he likely informed Castro in the fall of 1963 that the CIA was trying to kill him.

The twists in this 1963 plot are revealed in a secret document –- the CIA’s Inspector General report “On Plots To Assassinate Fidel Castro.” It was hand delivered to CIA Director Richard Helms in May 1967 and Helms considered it so explosive that he ordered all but one copy destroyed, as well as all the typing ribbons used to type it. That remaining single copy was kept in a vault and only released under the Freedom of Information Act on June 23, 1998. It raises serious questions about whether blowback from that operation, code named AMLASH, resulted in JFK’s assassination. My new ebook Killing Castro is based on that report (which is included as the appendix).